Content Analysis

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

By systematically investigating media messages for patterns in narrative and/or visual content, researchers often come to valuable insights about the construction and maintenance of reality. This course will focus on the methodological procedure of quantitative content analysis. It will include discussion of the method’s theoretical underpinnings and place among other quantitative methods of research. It will also offer an opportunity to design, conduct, and analyze content analysis research. A considerable portion of the semester will be dedicated to developing group research projects - the course is designed as a hands-on course. I will provide context, feedback, and lecture materials, but a significant portion of course time will be spent designing an analytic framework, collecting content data, analyzing data, and linking findings to your research questions and hypotheses. The final output of the course is a research paper utilizing the method.